THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARLIC

Garlic has been claimed to be good for everything from complexions and posture to sibling rivalry, impotence, tuberculosis, whiplash, cancer and scorpion bites.

Whether or not it is one of nature's medicines, its prodigious taste is of the essence in the cooking of France, China, Italy and Spain. But garlicky breath does offend, and the innocent herb has probably been the object of greater ambivalence than any other food in the history of civilization.

Garlic was a food staple in the ancient and medieval worlds. Herodotus claims that the Egyptians building the Pyramid of Cheops refused to work without daily portions of garlic. The Israelites wandering with Moses in the desert wept recalling "the fish, which we were wont to eat in Egypt for nought; the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlic; but now our soul is dried away; there is nothing at all." The ancient Greeks thought the odor of skorodon was vulgar, and barred garlic eaters from worshipping at the Temple of Cybele. But the Romans cooked with great quantities of the herb, primarily because they thought it was an aphrodisiac.

In socially fastidious eras, garlic has been relegated to condiment shelves or excluded from the kitchen arts entirely. And where it was popular with peasants it was often despised by lords. The Elizabethans, like the Romans, believed in garlic's aphrodisiac powers, but like the Greeks they thought its odors coarse: Shakespeare has Bottom in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" tell his actors to "eat no onions nor garlic, for we are to utter sweet breath"; and in "Measure for Measure," Lucio, "a fantastic," slanders the Duke by saying that "he would mouth with a beggar, though she smelt brown bread and garlic." Seventeenth-century English literature is full of fine ladies turning up their delicate noses at garlic's "intolerable rankness." And in Victorian England, where the predominant style was a genteel decorous propriety that would admit no strong odors or passions, Mrs. Beeton wrote in her 1861 "Book of Household Managementâ" that "the smell of this plant is generally considered offensive, and it is the most acrimonious in its taste of the whole alliaceous tribe... It was in greater repute with our ancestors than it is with ourselves, although it is still used as a seasoning or herb."

Garlic did not find its way into French haute cuisine until the early 19th century, but it has always been a central ingredient in the cuisine bourgeoise of the south of France, where the noon meal in homes and restaurants on winter Fridays is called aioli after the garlic mayonnaise it features.

The vicissitudes of belief in garlic's medicinal and mystical properties constitute another kind of social history. One of the herb's common names is "heal all," and garlic has almost always been seen as having some sort of curative power.

Eleanor Roosevelt took three chocolate-coated garlic perles every morning, on the advice of her physician, to improve her memory. Russian newspapers in the 1960's advised citizens to chew raw garlic in order to protect themselves against an epidemic of the flu. In May 1978, subscribers to Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Greater New York received with their bills a leaflet called Health Talk, informing them that garlic and onions help reduce cholesterol levels and blood clotting.

And, according to a recent book titled "Medical Botany," the files at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Md., contain a number of reports about possible uses of garlic in the fight against cancer. Clearly, garlic is a powerful folk remedy. Belief in its healing capacities has persisted for an astonishing 5,000 years, and its potent odor and taste have made it something of a cultural Rorschach test: it is seen as a remedy for whatever illnesses people are particularly anxious about, usually those that conventional medicine can't cure. Yet folk remedies are not just wishful thinking. They frequently work, whether or not science can find a reason, and they are based as often on trial and error as they are on superstition.

In the 1950's, middle-brow aspirations to gourmet exoticism produced the semichic of garlic bread, usually accompanying pots of spaghetti or chili and often made with salts or powders rather than fresh cloves. But part of the experience of the 1960's was an expansion of the boundaries of American taste. We are somewhat less finicky than we used to be about odors, and definitely more interested in cooking and eating well. In Berkeley, Calif., a French nouvelle cuisine restaurant called Chez Panisse celebrates garlic for a week in July, leading up to a Bastille Day feast in which every course of the dinner is made with garlic. And a group called the "Lovers of the Stinking Rose" in Berkeley publishes a newsletter called The Garlic Times.

The current penchant for nature and good food may not last, but for the time being at least the volatile garlic clove seems to be on the way to securing for itself a respectable place in American life. Whether or not garlic is, as the advertisement says, good and good for you, it is an essential ingredient in the world's great cuisines and a wonderful addition to our own. And whatever the demonstrable physical effects of Allium sativum turn out to be, several thousand years of belief in its powers probably won't come to an end even if scientists in Bethesda decide that it can't cure cancer.

By Jean Strouse in "The New York Times", Dec,9, 1979, re-published in "The Times of the Seventies", edited by Clyde Haberman, Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, New York, 2013. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.

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